Free Uses for Boys by Erica Lorraine Scheidt Page A

say I love you and he says I always
     loved you.” She doesn’t say anything. “Isn’t that romantic?” I ask.
    She doesn’t answer. She’s distracted. I can hear her at the stove and know that she’s
     scrambling eggs for her mom. She gets scared, I know, because her mom doesn’t eat.
    “I want you to meet him,” I say.
    “There’s a lot going on for me,” Toy says.
    “Your mom.”
    “No.” She sounds sharp and I can hear her mom in the background. “It’s Seth,” she
     says. “He has something special planned.” Even with my new apartment, Toy’s life sounds
     more romantic than mine. I miss her. I turn everything I see into a story to tell
     her.
    “I miss you,” I say. I’ve lived with Josh for two weeks and she hasn’t visited at
     all.
    I call Angel then, and walk up to her apartment. It’s small and she’s painted the
     walls red—she’ll never get her deposit back, she says—and admire the row of antique
     dresses that separates the sitting area from her bed. I run my hands along the paper-thin
     silk, too delicate to wear.
    I’m wearing my uniform, a long men’s cardigan with my favorite faded T-shirt and gray
     jeans with Converse sneakers. I can see a sliver of my reflection in Angel’s mirror
     and I look like the girl I imagined I’d be. I want to call Toy again and tell her.
    Angel asks me about Josh and I tell her that he likes it when I fall asleep with my
     head on his chest. I tell her how he keeps me wrapped up in his arms all night. How
     romantic it is, how he’s loved me forever.
    She knows how it is with boys. “It’s always romantic in the beginning,” she says.

 
    winter
    Josh wakes me up in the middle of the night to have sex. Sometimes he kneels over
     me and holds my wrists above my head. Sometimes he pulls me on top and I rock back
     and forth until he comes. I get up early to go to work. The apartment is so cold that
     I have to kneel in front of the space heater to get dressed. It’s winter. It isn’t
     the apartment I’d imagined it would be.
    My fake ID belongs to a girl named Elizabeth Ray Clark. She lives in Seattle and kind
     of looks like me. In her picture she has gray-blue eyes that look like mine. She squints
     through her eyelashes. I pretend to be her. I go by Liz, Lizzie. Lizbeth if you know
     me really well. My family calls me Beth. I live in my own apartment in Seattle with
     exposed brick walls and big windows, high ceilings and hardwood floors. I have sheer
     yellow curtains that bathe the room in warm colored light. I have a best friend who
     comes over and hangs out with me and a bicycle that I ride around the city. It has
     a basket. And I have a boyfriend. He’s funny and kind and he likes to write little
     notes and leave them around the apartment.
    Josh doesn’t write little notes. He was out of work when we met but now he has a job
     painting houses. He’s tired all the time. He’s nineteen. He’s pale and skinny and
     he doesn’t seem to want anything more than this.
    “I work too,” I say, but he says it’s not the same. He says I’m a spoiled rich kid
     who doesn’t know what it’s like in the real world. He says I’m just playing at it.
     I’m slumming.
    “I don’t want to spend my one day off painting,” he says when I ask if we can paint
     the apartment.
    The apartment is desolate. It swallows up all the pretty things I brought. I miss
     Toy. We’re in the tunnel of winter now and it’s always cold. Too cold to sit in the
     big chairs and talk. Instead we drink. We meet at the bar after we get off work. Josh
     teaches me to say what’s on tap, and how to choose the best of the cheap beers, and
     how, when I want to get drunk faster, to order tequila and drink it with lime and
     salt. He rests both elbows on the bar, head hanging between, like something collapsed.
    Josh’s stories loop so that now, after only a few months, I’ve heard them all. It
     gets dark early. We avoid the apartment and stay at